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The Pentagon on Climate Change.

WASHINGTON — The contentious debate over climate change is entering a new phase, with skeptics in the Trump administration poised to roll back regulations governing everything from clean-water standards to fracking — convinced that doing so will boost the U.S. economy. But the Pentagon views the issue differently.

For Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, climate change represents a significant national security threat, one that's "impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," according his written testimony to Congress provided in January ahead of his confirmation. The news site ProPublica was first to publish Mattis' remarks, pitting the retired Marine general's views against those held by the commander in chief and others in his administration.

The topic has renewed relevance as the White House aims to grow defense spending substantially — hoping to add personnel, and buy more ships, aircraft and weapons — while making major reductions to other parts of the federal budget, including at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which researches climate change and provides weather forecasting data to the military.

It's a tricky predicament for the Pentagon, which has conducted substantial climate-related research, too, dating back at least to the 1990s. Officials continue to factor this data into core military doctrine. In fact, the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, a 90-page document that outlines the Defense Department's strategic trajectory, includes the phrases "climate change" or "severe weather" at least 10 times. On the one hand, the Defense Department stands to benefit from funding rollbacks at other agencies. But on the other, senior officials see immediate, practical reasons to be worried.

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

So any personnel and equipment destined in the future for say, the ME, will have to equipped to protect itself and it's crew from the extremes of climate...
""Climate change will significantly worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa," he said. "Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate," he added."May 4, 2016http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/04/clima...habitable.html

and then there's the problem of more refugees............. some from US allies such as the Saudis............ Do you think Donald would allow Wahabist refugees? Or would their money overcome resistance......................

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

Originally Posted by skuthorp

So any personnel and equipment destined in the future for say, the ME, will have to equipped to protect itself and it's crew from the extremes of climate...
""Climate change will significantly worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa," he said. "Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate," he added."May 4, 2016http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/04/clima...habitable.html

and then there's the problem of more refugees............. some from US allies such as the Saudis............ Do you think Donald would allow Wahabist refugees? Or would their money overcome resistance......................

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

I watched the story on Four Corners last night. It's rubbish journalism... trying to make out that climate change is a bigger factor in certain conflicts than it really was.

Here's a comment on it from another viewer:

4 Corners hit a new low last night. I assume they didn't have to pay for the program.A documentary linking climate change with everything wrong on the planet.No Syria & other conflicts are not about religion, politics, social misfunction, international influence they're all about Climate change with a few ex military people, no-one ever heard of, confirming it all.Like droughts, famine & pestilence never happened before the Industrial revolution.It went for 45 minutes and never mentioned population growth may be a factor.

The military commentators referred to climate change as a "multiplier". No quantification of that multiplier - is it a doubling? Is it an extra 5%?

The reality in the two main regions mentioned is that deforestation is the driver of the droughts there. Yeah, that deforestation has led to localised climate changes and droughts and famine... but the program puffed it up out of proportion.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome and charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime" Mark Twain... so... Carpe the living sh!t out of the Diem
I'd rather look back at my life and say "I can't believe I did that" instead of being there saying "I wish I'd done that"

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

Originally Posted by LeeG

Good for you Ian, don't watch rubbish.

Actually, one should watch the rubbish journalism from time to time. One has to see what propaganda is being propogated, eh?

Programs like this, that misrepresent, do much wider harm. They are taking a related factor and blowing it out of proportion. As just posted on the other, less popular, thread, soil salinity appears to be a bigger issue than climate change. Still man-made, but not as sexy. Let's not forget, they've decimated the forests in that region... leading to less rainfall. Man has turned the Fertile Crescent into marginal land with far more direct actions than climate change.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome and charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime" Mark Twain... so... Carpe the living sh!t out of the Diem
I'd rather look back at my life and say "I can't believe I did that" instead of being there saying "I wish I'd done that"

(Jared Diamond is a professor of geography and environmental health sciences at UCLA. His book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies" won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize.)

Iraq sits along a stretch of land once so productive that the whole region -- which included present-day Syria, Iran and Jordan -- was known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times, the area led the world in agriculture and technology. It's hard to reconcile that history with the reality of today, when the term "Infertile Crescent" would seem more appropriate.

The Fertile Crescent's current desperation stands as testament to the steepest downturn of local fortunes since the end of the last Ice Age. For 8,000 years Iraq and its neighbors led the world as the source of most things embodied in the term "civilization." Technology, ideas and power flowed outward from Iraq to Europe and eventually to America. Iraq's decline holds lessons the world should heed.

The region's ancient dominance didn't arise from any biological superiority of its people, just as America's dominance today has nothing to do with our own biology. Instead, Fertile Crescent peoples profited from an accident of biogeography: They had the good fortune to occupy the world's largest zone of Mediterranean climate, home to the largest number of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Until 8500 BC, all the world's peoples obtained their food by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Then the ancient Iraqis and other Fertile Crescent peoples began to develop farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat, barley, peas, sheep, goats, pigs and cows. Even today, these species remain the world's staple crops and livestock. Agriculture fueled a population explosion, and also generated food surpluses that could be used to feed full-time professional specialists, who no longer had to devote time to procuring their own food.

These specialists fed by agriculture included smiths and metal workers, who developed the world's first copper tools around 5000 BC, bronze tools around 3000 BC and iron tools around 1500 BC. The specialists also included accountants and scribes, who developed the world's first writing system around 3400 BC. That was a huge head start: Writing didn't reach what is now the United States until 5,000 years later. It makes Iraq's current rate of illiteracy an especially cruel irony.

Agriculture also fed politicians, bureaucrats and judges. That's why the world's first states arose in Iraq around 3500 BC, and the first multiethnic empire arose there around 3000 BC. The Middle East continued to lead and dominate western Eurasia for several thousand more years, and its languages were spoken from Ireland to India. The English we speak today grew out of the Indo-European languages originally spoken by Middle Eastern peoples, and the fact that people in the United States speak it -- as opposed to a language derived from ancient Algonquin or some other Native American language family -- is a testament to the Middle East's ancient dominance.

So how did Fertile Crescent peoples lose that big lead? The short answer is ecological suicide: They inadvertently destroyed the environmental resources on which their society depended. Just as the region's rise wasn't due to any special virtue of its people, its fall wasn't due to any special blindness on their part. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in an extremely fragile environment, which, because of its low rainfall, was particularly susceptible to deforestation.

When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.

Once the Fertile Crescent began to decline for those environmental reasons, hostile neighbors helped speed the process. The original flow of power westward from the Fertile Crescent reversed in 330 BC, when the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great advanced eastward to conquer the eastern Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages, Mongol invaders from Central Asia destroyed Iraq's irrigation systems. After World War I, England and France dismembered the Ottoman Empire and carved out Iraq and other states as pawns of European colonial interests. As the end product of this history, the former world center of wealth, power and civilization is now poor in everything except oil. Iraq's leaders ensured that few benefits of that oil reached their people.

Iraq's decline holds a broader significance. Many other countries today face similar crippling environmental problems, including the deforestation, overgrazing, erosion and salinization that brought down the Fertile Crescent. Other countries already crippled or nearly so by such problems include Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Indonesia.

You may well detect a similarity between this list of looming environmental disasters and the CIA's list of overseas trouble spots, places prone to civil wars and violent regime changes -- places to which we often end up dispatching U.S. troops. Those two lists are related by cause and effect. When environmental damage makes people economically desperate, they are likely to suffer from poor health and short life spans, blame their governments, kill each other, end up with crazy leaders and seek to immigrate illegally to more favored landscapes.

The First World can respond to these Third World problems in one of three ways. It can provide humanitarian aid once a crisis has arisen. It can ignore the situation as long as possible and then intervene militarily once the crisis cannot be ignored (at a cost, in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, of an estimated $100 billion per intervention when you add up all the potential costs of military action and rebuilding). Or it can intervene before a crisis to stave off looming problems.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome and charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime" Mark Twain... so... Carpe the living sh!t out of the Diem
I'd rather look back at my life and say "I can't believe I did that" instead of being there saying "I wish I'd done that"

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

I watched the story on Four Corners last night. It's rubbish journalism... trying to make out that climate change is a bigger factor in certain conflicts than it really was.

Here's a comment on it from another viewer:

4 Corners hit a new low last night. I assume they didn't have to pay for the program.A documentary linking climate change with everything wrong on the planet.No Syria & other conflicts are not about religion, politics, social misfunction, international influence they're all about Climate change with a few ex military people, no-one ever heard of, confirming it all.Like droughts, famine & pestilence never happened before the Industrial revolution.It went for 45 minutes and never mentioned population growth may be a factor.

The military commentators referred to climate change as a "multiplier". No quantification of that multiplier - is it a doubling? Is it an extra 5%?

The reality in the two main regions mentioned is that deforestation is the driver of the droughts there. Yeah, that deforestation has led to localised climate changes and droughts and famine... but the program puffed it up out of proportion.

Keep burning coal eh Ian ?

IN BRIEF

Drought, which is being exacerbated by climate change and bad government policies, has forced more than a million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities. Water shortages, ruined land and corruption, they say, fomented revolution.

Lack of work, along with ensuing violence, has prompted many Syrians to flee to Turkey and then cross the ocean to Greece. Hundreds of adults and children have drowned along the way.

Climate scientists say Syrian droughts will become more frequent and severe, a trend that could expand across the Middle East and the Mediterranean region.

Re: The Pentagon on Climate Change.

Didn't read the article, eh?

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome and charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime" Mark Twain... so... Carpe the living sh!t out of the Diem
I'd rather look back at my life and say "I can't believe I did that" instead of being there saying "I wish I'd done that"